Domestic Product Unveiling Awaits, Yet Smartphone Collaboration Takes the Lead.

While Manus's domestic product is still in the pipeline, Chinese smartphone makers have already jumped on board as partners.

On October 13, OPPO announced a partnership with Manus, integrating its agent capabilities into the AI Mind Pilot feature of ColorOS 17, initially available on the Find X10 series. This integration will empower users to delegate multi-step tasks to AI within their smartphone ecosystem. The specific markets for this feature will be revealed at the product launch.

The news came as a surprise. Manus, which had encountered hurdles in its acquisition by Meta, recently announced its return to independent operations. On October 8, its parent company, Butterfly Effect, secured over $500 million in funding, led by Boyu Capital and IDG Capital, with continued support from existing investors like Tencent, Sequoia China, and ZhenFund. Just days later, Manus emerged in OPPO's new smartphone strategy.

Manus, previously unavailable in China, now sees a fresh opportunity in the Chinese market: embedding its capabilities into smartphones from local manufacturers. It offers agent services, while smartphone makers provide system access. Users can purchase an OPPO smartphone and discover Manus within.

01 Doubao as a Smartphone Assistant, Manus Integrated into Smartphone Ecosystem

This collaboration draws parallels to Doubao smartphones. Organizing data and handling cross-app tasks are now standard AI features for smartphones. When comparing feature lists, the differences in collaboration models may not be immediately apparent.

Doubao teamed up with Nubia to create a smartphone assistant named Doubao.

As this assistant integrates into smartphones, Doubao is also opening its services to developers. It has already partnered with Cao Cao Mobility and mapping services, enabling task completion through simulated clicks and tool calls. Users interact with Doubao, which then coordinates subsequent apps and services. For ByteDance, the smartphone elevates Doubao from an app that needs to be opened to buttons, voice wake-ups, and system interactions.

The cross-app task list and execution status displayed on the Doubao smartphone assistant's official website.

Manus's role in the OPPO collaboration is distinct. OPPO's AI Mind Pilot remains the user's gateway, with the new Agent mode initially supporting both Manus and ChatGPT. Users can link their existing subscriptions to continue using them; OPPO will also offer free quotas. The earlier Ask mode already includes Gemini, Perplexity, and ChatGPT.

OPPO's announced ColorOS 17 features also encompass data organization and photo editing. According to its introduction, AI Mind Space can save lengthy articles and links and automatically gather related content; photo editing is managed by AI Photo Agent, where users describe the desired effect, and the system makes the necessary adjustments.

What Manus brings to AI Mind Pilot is the ability to execute multi-step tasks using smartphone data. Taking OPPO's demonstrated itinerary organization as an example, users outline their travel plans, and AI Mind Pilot locates flight tickets, hotel reservations, and attraction tickets on the phone, then combines online information to generate an itinerary. Manus provides target understanding, multi-step planning, and task execution capabilities, while OPPO adapts it into the system, allowing phone data to be accessed with user permission. Tasks that previously required users to collect, upload files, and operate them one by one can now be completed within a single assistant.

In Manus's official demonstration, AI Mind Pilot generates a travel itinerary based on data within the phone.

This collaboration also respects local processing boundaries. According to OPPO, local tasks such as searching, organizing, and renaming files are handled by on-device models, with raw content remaining on the phone; when tasks require external processing, the system requests explicit user authorization before uploading or sharing related content. Manus gains the opportunity to enter the smartphone workflow, but data access and usage still depend on system arrangements and user permissions.

From the announced product forms, Doubao fosters an assistant relationship with users, while Manus becomes one of the services that OPPO's assistant can call upon. The former has the potential to make users develop the habit of "turning to Doubao for anything"; the latter first gains usage opportunities through OPPO's entry point and then relies on task completion effectiveness to strive for users to continue choosing it.

Both approaches require smartphone manufacturers to cooperate at the system level. Doubao has not ventured into smartphone manufacturing itself, and Manus's collaboration with OPPO also involves deep adaptation. The difference lies in how much work AI companies undertake in front of users and how much experience smartphone manufacturers organize into their products.

02 Smartphone Manufacturers Are No Strangers to Such Collaborations

In 2022, when Xiaomi announced its collaboration with Leica, Lei Jun shared a specific detail: Leica engineers visited Beijing and worked with the Xiaomi team on joint tuning. By July 2025, OPPO and Hasselblad extended their collaboration, which had spanned multiple generations of Find models, to continue developing the next-generation imaging system.

These collaborations bring camera companies' professional expertise into smartphones. Consumers can utilize the tuning results from both parties when they open their smartphone cameras; the names Leica and Hasselblad also lend distinctiveness to this part of the experience. Smartphone manufacturers add selling points with external teams, while camera companies have the opportunity to reach people who have not previously purchased professional cameras.

In July 2025, OPPO and Hasselblad announced the extension of their imaging collaboration.

OPPO has already introduced other AI services in this manner. The Reno14 supports long-pressing the side button to activate Gemini; in India, the purchase benefits for the Find X9 include a three-month subscription to Google AI Pro. Delivering new services to users with smartphones is already a method it uses to sell products.

For Manus, OPPO provides a sales channel with years of operation. According to Omdia, OPPO's global smartphone shipments in 2025 reached 100.7 million units. Manus begins collaborating with the new Find X10 series, targeting consumers preparing to buy smartphones. They might not have specifically sought out an Agent product before, but now they can get a chance to use Manus with their new smartphones.

Users initiate tasks from OPPO's assistant and may remember OPPO first. With Manus and ChatGPT in the same entry point, existing usage habits and actual task effectiveness will influence which one users choose next. Meanwhile, existing subscriptions can be linked to the phone, and the relationship between Manus and its paying users remains intact. A paying user can bring their account into the phone; new users, after a free trial, also have the opportunity to become its subscribers.

Imaging collaborations and Agent collaborations both require continuous research and development and adaptation to new models. Agent services also continue to generate computing expenses as tasks are executed. Manus's billing explanation lists consumption such as model calls, virtual machines, and third-party APIs. After smartphones are sold, the more users use them, the more services need to be provided behind the scenes.

OPPO's free quotas make it convenient for users to try it out first. The post-experience payment arrangements will affect service usage and also relate to who bears these ongoing costs. Neither party has disclosed authorization fees, call fees, or revenue-sharing terms, and the income generated from the collaboration has not been disclosed. After delivering services to users with smartphones, operational and maintenance work will continue, and both parties' investments will extend beyond new product launches.

Providing AI capabilities to smartphone manufacturers has long been a business endeavor. Volcano Engine has already equipped OPPO's Xiao Bu assistant with the Doubao model and online retrieval capabilities, and both parties jointly develop agent applications. In 2025, Alibaba and Honor signed an AI strategic cooperation agreement to jointly develop on-device models, agents, and multimodal capabilities based on Tongyi Qianwen. In addition to self-research, smartphone manufacturers have also been relying on external collaborations to integrate AI more deeply into their systems.

Manus is now also part of this landscape. What it brings to OPPO is the already-productized multi-step planning and task execution capabilities. For Manus, this means that in addition to directly competing for subscription users, it has an additional commercial path through collaboration with smartphone manufacturers. The smartphone AI upgrade business that Volcano Engine and Tongyi Qianwen have already participated in now also has Manus to get a share.

03 Manus's Product Is Still in the Works, But Using Manus Isn't

On October 8, the day it announced its financing, Manus also published job listings for 17 positions, spanning product, research and development, operations, and growth, to bolster its team in Beijing.

This is not Manus's first mention of a domestic product. In March 2025, it announced a collaboration with Alibaba's Tongyi Qianwen team to explore using domestic models and computing power to achieve domestic functionality. A year and a half later, when the company released Manus 2.0 for overseas markets, it again stated that it was forming a domestic product team and that collaborations with domestic model manufacturers and ecosystem partners were also progressing, still without announcing a launch time for the domestic version.

OPPO's collaboration can progress alongside these preparations. The domestic team continues to prepare local products, while the Manus services already available overseas have the opportunity to enter the global sales system of Chinese smartphone manufacturers first. It does not have to wait until domestic consumers can register and use it to establish new business relationships with Chinese companies.

This also gives "returning to China" a more concrete meaning. Recruiting in Beijing and finding domestic model partners are steps toward creating the product; collaborating with a Chinese smartphone manufacturer can also add channels for overseas business first. The nationality of the users and the partner company does not need to completely overlap.

On October 21, OPPO will unveil the Find X10 series in Mallorca, Spain. Manus's domestic product has not yet had an official launch, but Chinese smartphone manufacturers have already included it in their overseas release plans.

However, AIOS still faces the same permission issue. The day after OPPO announced its collaboration, the screen automation operation statement agreement for the Doubao smartphone assistant ended its 30-day public notification period, and the official also announced the latest list of applications that refuse operations. For applications that explicitly refuse, Doubao stated that it would not operate on behalf of users.

The list of applications that refuse operations (partial) announced by the Doubao smartphone assistant on October 14.

If tasks extend from organizing itineraries to booking tickets and placing orders, OPPO and Manus will also encounter permissions and rules from app manufacturers. Smartphone manufacturers can decide which Agent to integrate but cannot decide for app manufacturers whether to allow it to act on behalf of users.

The line drawn by app manufacturers is one that OPPO and Manus will also encounter. When tasks extend from organizing itineraries to booking tickets and placing orders, they need to face the permissions and rules of different apps. Smartphone manufacturers can decide which Agent to integrate but must continue to interact with app manufacturers that provide services next.

Even so, in terms of the intensity of introducing external general-purpose Agents, OPPO has taken a quite bold step among traditional smartphone manufacturers. It has integrated Manus into the system-level assistant, allowing a product created by an external team to have the opportunity to plan and execute tasks by combining information from the phone. The collaboration goes deep into the user's daily smartphone usage, meaning that OPPO is willing to entrust a part of the important product experience to be jointly completed by both parties.

This is also why smartphone manufacturers are worth continuing to invest in. Smartphones already store a large amount of information that users need to handle things, but in the past, finding it, understanding the relationships between them, and deciding what to do next were mainly the user's own tasks. OPPO's collaboration with Manus starts to shift part of this to the system. Even if tasks like booking tickets and making payments still require user involvement, the preceding searching, organizing, and planning also have independent usage value.

For OPPO, the next step is to make this convenience a stable daily experience. If a demonstration can complete a travel plan, users will naturally expect it to handle the next equally troublesome task. Tasks will become increasingly complex, and the number of apps that need to be coordinated will also increase. The list published by Doubao has already shown the resistance on this path in advance.

However, the trajectory and advantages are already apparent. Smartphone producers have dedicated years to enabling users to launch apps more swiftly and locate functionalities with greater ease. Now, OPPO is embarking on an endeavor to undertake tasks on behalf of users that traditionally follow app activation. For individuals who manage mundane tasks on their smartphones daily, such advancements are readily comprehensible: tasks that once demanded significant effort can finally become less burdensome.